Letter: What hasn’t he taken away?

Robert Graybehl says in his recent letter, “What has he [Trump] taken away? … so far as I can see, nothing.”

I guess Trump-love is truly blind. We have lost so much since President Donald Trump took office that it is hard to count the ways.

First, Trump has reduced the power and dignity of the office. Foreign leaders call him a buffoon, deem him untrustworthy, and they are turning away from the United States and looking to each other, rather than the United States.

Second, Trump has purposefully weakened the U.S. State Department by not filling key jobs and by constantly contradicting the Secretary of State. The once powerful State Department has been reduced to a twitter account, and our weakness is playing into Putin’s hands.

Additionally, because Trump has turned the domestic agenda over to the Republican leadership and is filling the swamp with conservative billionaires, we are losing our clean air and water through deregulation of coal companies and the rescinding of the clean air and water acts. We are losing beautiful, open federal land to drillers and mining, and we lose protections from harmful insecticides and chemicals.

Finally, through Trump’s bigotry and open discrimination against people of color, he has loosed the demons of racism across this country. Trump’s discriminatory voter-fraud commission had to be abandoned, but Republican legislatures across the country are finding ways to keep people of color from voting.

Thus, the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” has taken away much and stands to do more damage in the years to come.